With a little help from my friends...

April 2008

What is going swimmingly in your life at the moment?

After all my mopey life posts this week, it's nice to finally have a prompt I have a good, solid answer for. The thing that is going swimmingly in my life right now? My friends.

Living in Oklahoma, I made friends but the ones I was closest to were in OKC. My friends in Tulsa were usually busy with work or school when I had free time. Suffice it to say, I spent a lot of lonely weekends cleaning my apartment, grocery shopping and generally being bored. It wasn't fun.

I wasn't thrilled to leave Tulsa - I loved it there - but I was excited to be closer to my friends from growing up again. There's nothing like being able to call your BFF at the last minute and say "Hey, let's go get ice cream."

And since I moved back two years ago, two of my good friends also moved back - one from Austin, the other from Florida - and it's like I have everyone under one roof again. And I'm loving it. The best part? Everyone gets along, so it's so much easier to bring everyone together - no stress about keeping person A and person B apart so they don't fight because I'm usually the one everyone gets along with...

I have Mel or Angela to go do music stuff with. Amanda H. is always up for an impromptu visit to Half Price Books with me. All three of my childhood BFFs (pictured above) live within 45 minutes of me, and we've been able to spend more time together in the last four months than the last four years. My brother and his wife only live 10 minutes away, and though we don't hang out often because of work schedules they might be my favorites because they're so low key - drink a beer, watch a movie and it's a great evening. Even my Oklahoma friends have been kind enough to come visit me multiple times since I moved home or meet me halfway in Dallas for a music adventure - a favor I'm hoping to repay at the end of the summer.

I forgot what it was like to have a sense of community, to have all these people who are instantly there for you when you want to go see a band or just get dinner or run an errand. And since summer started, it feels like we have something to do every weekend. It's rare now for me to sit at home all Friday and Saturday night, bored and mindlessly watching hours of TV because there's nothing better to do.

Is this sounding a little too "I have a life!"? Oh well.

So if you're reading this, and you're my friend...thanks. You've helped turn my move - and what I equated to admitting defeat - into an experience I wouldn't change for anything.